Jamie Sarkonak: The Liberal state always wins

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Rinse and repeat for every vanguard social issue the party takes on: reconciliation, immigration, etc. Any profession that comes through the university can serve the cause. Social work, nursing, education — evenengineering, and especially law.

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The surrender of law schools to the left has been a cornerstone of perpetual conservative loss. You can turn nearly an entire profession against mandatory minimum sentences if most of the people teaching future lawyers are enthusiastically opposed to them, and this is, of course, what happened. Faculty politics will crowd dissenters out. In time, you get a legal system that automatically institutes race-based laws, removes the state’s ability to imprison mass murderers for life, forces the state to provide citizen benefits to anyone with a pulse who illegally enters the country, and so on. It doesn’t matter that it’s wrong or that these ideas in practice can bankrupt the country; what’s important is that most judges agree with them.

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It’s not just the schools, of course. It’s the organizations that claim to advocate for their profession, the regulatory bodies, the legal advocacy groups, the think tanks, the government advisory boards. Every open seat that’s federally appointable, the Liberals can find an ally to fill it. The guarantee of a reward is conducive to attracting more allies, who can in turn be tasked with manning whatever post.

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Indeed, the result is a surplus of onside people who need new places to be stabled. The Liberals see this and capitalize on the opportunity, giving “capacity-building” grants to onside non-profits and “social enterprise” businesses while doling out endless low-stakes contracts to advocacy groups. Sometimes, they simply make another federal agency or commission to raise profiles and develop careers: there’s another advantage to reviving the Law Commission of Canada and nurturing the Court Challenges Program, both partisan in function.

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Hence the bucketloads of funding to the gender lawfare group Egale Canada and the migration accelerationists at the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. When the Canadian Anti-Hate Network was paid to create a guide for schoolteachers (who are mostly in provincial jurisdiction) that demonized European history and linked Canada’s old flag, the Red Ensign, to white nationalism, this had the helpful side effects of keeping the organization’s budget healthy and bolstering its legitimacy. The network’s founder, Bernie Farber, was recently made an advisor to the federal government on online safety. These groups provide stakeholder input when the government needs to justify new heights of nonsense, and they spam the courts with “public interest” arguments whenever a provincial government tries to tap the brakes.

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Industry isn’t much different. With decades of Liberal rule and hard top-down diversity mandates, banks are comfortable adopting anti-meritocratic approaches to staffing and even business funding. Years of aggressive push for concessions on the climate and Indigenous reconciliation fronts have brought the oil and gas industry to heel (yes, it’s bad for business, no, we’re not going to publicly object to it).

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Even the toxic Cowichan decision out of the B.C. courts, which has thrown the validity of mortgages into question after the federal government sabotaged its own arguments to assist the interests of Indigenous people over colonist-descended Canadians, wouldn’t be commented on by the various lenders I contacted to get a sense of the damage. They directed me to ask the Canadian Bankers Association for its thoughts, which said only that it was monitoring the matter.

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Everyone who operates in the federal government’s jurisdiction knows about its aggressive social agenda, and so when that agenda interferes with the basic workings of an entire sector, no one wants to get in the way. Everyone outside of federal jurisdiction has still somehow become a client of the feds, through funding, contracts, or indirectly through professional consensus propped up by the feds.